Poor corporate decision making. They decided the current situation is worth minimizing leaks and "launching first", even if it's a paper launch and people will be unable to buy product even after competitors launch their own product. We may see AMD 6000's on the shelf before the 3080's at this rate. Product scarcity creates a different environment today than it did in the 1990's but corporate decision making mentality is still focused on pushing the timetable envelope beyond the realistic.
Just-in-time inventories is nothing new, yet companies have been launching product with smaller and smaller existing launch day supply, and for most of the last decade this translates into paper launches. It will be ironic if AMD's 6000 cards hard launch and people can buy those when the 3080 remains unavailable, but at the end of the day the management at NVIDIA won't learn anything despite gifting AMD a perfect storm of launch conditions for its competing product. I doubt NVIDIA even cares anymore about the sheer amount of flack and burned goodwill its AIBs are suffering right now, let alone ire generated against its own brand. People won't be able to buy 3080s for months, so would delaying the launch a single month to build some inventory first have truly hurt anything? In their rationalization doing so was worse than the resulting mess we're seeing now. It's worth noting that by NVIDIA's own admission internal predictions indicated the 3000 launch would break records, but NVIDIA decided it still wasn't worth building inventory up for ahead of time.